Who invented the blender?
One evening back in 1936, a visionary named Fred Osius put on his dark blue woolen shirt, some striped pants, a bright parrot-yellow tie, and a cutaway coat, then headed for Manhattan’s Vanderbilt Hotel, where a musician named Fred Waring had just signed-off from regular radio broadcast with his popular singing group, the “Pennsylvanians.” Mr. Waring was backstage when the colorful Mr. Osius appeared with the prototype of a gizmo he claimed would “revolutionize people’s eating habits.” The inventor had come to ask the successful entertainer to invest in both the making and the marketing of this thing he called the “Miracle Mixer.” But when Fred Osius turned it on, it simply didn’t work, and he left the same way he had come in. Undaunted, Osius spent the next six months and some $25,000 more without any further success. Meanwhile, Fred Waring remained intrigued and eventually became interested; he liked this guy and his idea, so he joined up with the project. By September of 1937, Fred
